Google Acquires Web-Fraud Tracker Spider.io

Google acquired Spider.io, a London-based company that specializes in identifying and blocking online-traffic fraud. It’s the latest sign that the “anti-bot” industry is good business.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Spider was at the center of a swirling crisis in the online ad world when it identified and called out the infamous Chameleon bot, which Spider claimed had infected thousands of computers and generated nine million bogus ad impressions a month across more than 200 websites. According to Spider, online-traffic vendors employ “bots,” or programs that infect computers and mimic human traffic, creating artificial ad impressions that can be sold to advertisers across exchanges and networks.

Google has vowed to take the bot problem seriously, and online ad experts say its exchange, AdEx, is the least bot-infected. Google also has its own vast ad network where it must guard against partners employing bots to juice up their own traffic and ad-performance data. Still, it is noteworthy that Google chose to buy a company like Spider rather than build its own antibot technology.

In a blog post Friday, Google’s vice president of display advertising, Neal Mohan, said that over the past year, Google blocked millions of bad actors from its network. But it needs more help. “Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today,” Mohan wrote. “But this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest. To grow the pie for everyone, we need to take head on the issue of online fraud.”

Google’s plan is to bake Spider’s fraud-detection technology into its video and display ad products. Mohan was upfront about his motives: Google wants to clean up the online-ad market so the so-called good guys get more value for their ad inventory. The goal is a “clearer, cleaner picture of what campaigns and media are truly delivering strong results,” he wrote. “Also, by including spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.”